This two-day conference brings together scholars and paper experts from more than 12 countries and 3 continents, working across a range of disciplines and geographic areas, and interested in the ways in which paper supported, shaped, or otherwise influenced practices of politics and political communications in the period ca.1250-ca.1850 (the age of European rag-paper). It aims to sketch a more integral picture of the ways in which paper permitted early modern politics and political communications to unfold. Two hands-on workshops precede the conference on 8 June, with an optional excursion on 11 June to the 17th-century working wind-driven paper mill De Schoolmeester.

Our Program can be found here (pdf) and on this site!To register to attend, or for more information, see the conference website http://politicsofpaper.wix.com/politicsofpaper or email politicsofpaperATgmail.com. Please note that due to recent changes to Internet Explorer, the website works best on IE10+ or on other browsers such as Firefox or Safari! For questions regarding registration, travel, or accomodations please contact the Groningen Congress Bureau at infoATgcb.nl.

Please do forward the program and ﻿﻿this poster﻿﻿ to any potentially-interested friends, colleagues, or students!

Adriaen Brouwer, The Good Father (1631), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

I will lead a discussion around the topic "From rags to riches: recycling and paper production in early modern Europe" at the third edition of the University of Groningen summer school in the history of material culture, Things that Matter. This summer school studies the instabilities inherent in material objects and their changing uses and usability in the past. We will approach material objects methodologically and theoretically through juxtaposition, dichotomy and temporality. We will discuss the relationships and the natures of objects of attention and objects of neglect or everyday use. We will also discuss the importance of the mundane. In addition, we will analyse the relationship between so-called secular and sacred relics. The recent interest in "second-handedness" and recycling such as the second life of textiles and other household items will also be addressed.

For more information, or to register to attend the summer school, see the summer school website here or email Prof. dr. Mineke Bosch or Prof. dr. Raingard Esser at thingsthatmatterATrug.nl. Application deadline: 31 May 2016.

I presented the paper "Recycled Rags and the Politics of Paper in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe" at the exciting post-grad/early career conference Re/Generate: Materiality and the Afterlives of Things in the Middle Ages, 500-1500, organized by Art History students Emily Savage and Ioana Coman at the lovely University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK, 6-7/5/2016. I particularly enjoyed hearing about Sarah Mirza's work with pre-Islamic Arabian "shoe-notebooks", discussing children as vermin(-spreaders) with Richard Oram, learning of humanist appropriations of Augsburg's "pyr" (certainly a watermark!), talking spolia with Meg Boulton and Indra Werthmann or textile-reusage with Ingrid Nodseth and Katharine Rudy, seeing new patterns in Katharina Nordhofen's bejewelled Byzantine book-covers, and of course discussing paper-recycling with Emily Butterworth, who gave a marvellous talk on early modern fantasies of books' afterlives. A special highlight was the trip to the Special Collections Library to view 'recycled' books with Rare Books Librarian Daryl Green.

I presented a talk "Violence in the Archives", a discussion of archival theories and practices in colonial archives, to the NWO-Vidi project "No More Heroes: Violence and Resistance in New World Poetry". It was a pleasure to meet the project's enthusiastic new Ph.D. students!

I presented a paper on the materiality of diplomatic documents, entitled "Recycled Rags and Dragon Intestines? Paper and Parchment in Early Modern Diplomatic Dispatches", at the well-attended conference on early modern European diplomatic dispatches organized by Univ.-Prof. dr. Phil. Christina Roll, Dr. Thomas Kirchner, and Dr. Thomas Dorfner. Drawing together scholars working on diplomatic dispatches from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in polities across Europe, the conference offered excellent comparative opportunities to reflect on continuities and on changes in the writing (or dictating) and use (or abuse, or neglect) of diplomatic dispatches across the early modern period.

I organized the panel "The Politics of Passage: Negotiating Safe-Conduct in Early Modern Europe" with fellow safe-conduct fans Magnus Ressel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and Luca Scholz (EUI). My paper, "Paper Presents: Diplomatic Safe Conducts as Political Gifts", argued that scholars of diplomatic gift-giving have overlooked diplomatic safe-conducts, which were typically granted free-of-charge by princes to passing diplomats. Though not luxury gifts made of precious materials, these paper documents constituted, expressed and published powerful theoretical claims about princely jurisdiction and sovereign authority. Such paper presents, I argued, can problematize the ways we write and think about safe-conducts, about early modern diplomatic gifts, and about early modern embassies.

I focused on sixteenth-century political safe-conducts; Luca's excellent paper provided colorful examples of the conflicts surrounding seventeenth-century regalian and political safe-conducts, while Magnus' insightful presentation examined mercantile and maritime safe-conducts in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean world. Francesca Trivellato of Yale very kindly chaired our panel, and thanks, too, to Markus Friedrich for provocative questions!

WorkshopDocumenting Paper(work) in International History: A WorkshopColumbia University, New York, USA, 29 March 2016

I talked about "Parsing Paperwork in Early Modern Diplomacy" as part of a workshop on paperwork and theories of paper in early modern international policy-making and imperial governance, organized by Asheesh Siddique (Columbia University). The workshop particularly focused on histories of material practices and processes in statecraft. I showed how one ordinary bi-weekly diplomatic report in the mid-sixteenth century could trigger a whole constellation of paper(work), arguing that the constellation of paperwork can tell us far more about how paper was used, and about how diplomacy or foreign policy-making functioned, than any single diplomatic relation. Asheesh's great presentation on Scottish East India Company historiographer and State Paper Office Keeper John Bruce's rich archives threw new light on paperwork in British colonial America and reinforced the importance of paperwork in imperial governance. Despite competing with a talk on the History of Sex at the same time-slot, the Paperwork workshop generated a productive conversation!

This stimulating and rich conference, organized by Philippe Cordez (Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität) and Romedio Schmitz-Esser (Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani) asked how we can define and understand “Venetian” commodities in the late medieval and early modern eras. More than any other medieval or early modern city, Venice lived off of the trade of portable goods, both locally-produced and foreign imports. The conference focused on the question of how Venice designed and exported its own identity through all kinds of its goods. The conference's fascinating papers, presented in the incomparable setting of the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza overlooking the Grand Canal, traced the trajectories of luxury goods such as glassware, rock-crystal items, enamelware, goldwork, ivories, panel paintings, damascene ware, table-clocks, silver, and silk and velvet textiles and prompted far-ranging and engaging discussions.

Drawing on research from the Vienna, Trento, and Venice archives, my paper on Venetian paper argued that in the early modern era, fine-quality writing and drawing paper produced in the Veneto and marketed beyond the Alps and in the Levant as coveted "Venetian paper" was an important export for the Venetian state -- not only in economic terms, but also ideologically. The paper fit nicely with Dario Zorza's insightful and beautifully-presented examination of state concern over the paper quality in Venetian books.

The well-framed keynote by Luca Molà pushed conference attendees to consider also ephemeral goods, such as sugar or soap -- and, for this paper enthusiast, raised the question of sugar- and soap-wrapping paper. The conference concluded with an impromptu midnight tour of San Marco's south portal!

This article, based on a paper presented at the 10. Arbeitstagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Frühe Neuzeit im Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands in Munich in September 2013, explored how the Austrian Habsburg court chancelleries obtained the paper they used to correspond with princes and diplomats abroad. It argued for the role of paper and paper production, which dramatically expanded in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in making possible the development of (residential) diplomacy and new trends in archiving and archival management.

The volume includes many other great papers on early modern practices -- check out especially the stimulating contributions of my fellow panelists Lizzie Williamson & Randy Head! You can click here to purchase this volume.

Student Assistantships

'Paper Princes' Announces Three New Student Assistants for 2015-2016!

The 'Paper Princes' project is excited to welcome three new Student Assistants:

The Assistantships' goal is to assist talented MA students to learn more about academic research, to build competitive CVs, and to develop internationally-engaged, well-designed and innovative Ph.D. proposals, with an eye to obtaining doctoral positions in a field related to the Paper Princes project. For more information click here.

"'...This continuous writing': The Paper Chancellery of Bernhard Cles", in Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World, ed. Paul Dover (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2015).

This article examines the foreign policy-making apparatus of Austrian Habsburg chancellor Bernhard Cles, cardinal and Prince-Bishop of Trent, from 1526 and 1539. Cles' chancellorship, the article argues, offers an excellent illustration of how paper, as material medium, not only supported early modern diplomacy's new reporting functions and the era's foreign policy-making processes, but also shaped them.

The volume, edited by Paul Dover of Kennesaw State University, will contain essays by leading scholars on early modern statesmen and chancellors, from well-known figures such as Mercurino Gattinara, Axel Oxenstierna, William Cecil, Baron Burghley, Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, or Cardinal Mazarin, to their lesser-known contemporaries such as16th-century Mughal secretary Chandar Bhan Brahmin, Savoyard secretary Alessandro Scaglia, Russian statesman Ivan Tarasyevich Gramotin, or Eberhard von Danckelmann, first minister to Elector Friedrich III. It promises to be an excellent collection!

I joined the research network The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe, organized by RSA co-panelist Prof. dr. Daniel Bellingradt of Erlangen-Nürnberg and Ph.D. student Sandra Zawrel. The network aims to bring together international experts from different disciplinary backgrounds to encourage a lively discussion on one of the most poorly-known economic activities of the early modern period in Europe – the paper trade. The network focuses on transnational/international perspectives on the organization of the paper trade, and various management processes linking paper production with distribution. Additionally it seeks to engage with recent research on paper in media theory.

Groningen (detail), Braun & Hogenberg 1582

Invited Lectures

'Lutje' Historisch Genootschap, Groningen, 29 May 2015

I presented my work-in-progress as "Paper Princes: Papier in de opkomst van de (vroeg)moderne diplomatie" to the historians, archivists, archaeologists, and scholars of Groningen's 'Little' Historical Association.

This article explores how the material setting of an early modern chancellery influenced its daily work as well as how it received, processed, and archived diplomatic correspondence. The article was based on rarely-consulted chancellery account books for the Austrian Habsburg Treasury Chancellery which I discovered while looking for evidence of the court chancellery's paper-purchasing patterns. The account books show purchases of furniture such as writing desks, stoves to keep scribes' hands and ink warm, inkwells, archival chests, and mouse-traps -- which help us to reconstruct the physical and material settings within which political communications occurred in early modern courts.

Renaissance Society of America 2015 Annual Conference (Berlin, Germany, 22-26 March 2015) I organized an international panel for the RSA Annual Conference in Berlin on paper as a material artifact of governance and trade in the early modern world. The well-attended, standing-room-only panel was chaired by Prof. dr. Dagmar Freist (Oldenburg). Presenters included:

- Dr. M.K. Williams, 'The Apothecary, the Secretary, and the Diplomat: Apothecaries as Purveyors of Paper, Ink, and Information', showed that chancellery secretaries, diplomats, spies, and newswriters often acquired the tools of their trade -- paper, ink, and information -- from apothecaries. - Tobias Hodel (University of Zurich), 'Organizing and Relocating the Documents of a Dissolved Monastery: Paper and Parchment in Königsfelden Abbey', examined how medieval documents from a Swiss monastery were organized and used following the monastery's dissolution in 1528. - Dr. Daniel Bellingradt (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), 'Inbetween cooperation and competition: Amsterdam’s paper merchants in the eighteenth-century book trade', explored the key roles of paper merchants in eighteenth-century Amsterdam's flourishing printing, publishing, and bookselling industries. - Lucas Haasis (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg), 'Stubborn Paper: Doing the Paperwork in 18th-Century Mercantile Correspondence', showed how central practices of letter-writing were to the maintenance of eighteenth-century German mercantile networks.

The discussion was wide-ranging and focused especially on epistolary practices and the paper trade. It's great to see so much interest in paper as material communications technology and its circulation in the early modern world!

I chaired the panel 'Comparative Archival Histories in the Early Modern World I: The State in the Archive'. The panel, organized by Randy Head (University of California-Riverside) included three exciting papers:Ron Makleff of UC-Berkeley presented on archival disarray in the Lille Chambre des Comptes between 1473 and 1667, Erik Thomson of the University of Manitoba discussed Swedish minister Axel Oxenstierna's archival practices, and Robert Fulton of Northern Illinois University discussed the formation of the French Dépôt de la Guerre as a site of 'state' memory.

I presented together with Randy Head in the conference's second panel on archives, 'Comparative Archival Histories II: Archival Spaces'. Randy's paper explored the conundrums of proof and information in early theoreticians of European archival practice, from von Ramingen to Mabillon. My paper, entitled 'Rat-Traps in the Registratur: Furnishing an Early Modern Chancellery Archive', looked at how the space of the chancellery archive (Registratur) influenced archiving practices. It used chancellery account books for the Austrian Habsburg Court Chancellery.

We concluded the two panels with a lively round-table on new trends, opportunities and challenges in the comparative study of archival history, and plan to publish our papers shortly!

As part of the opening day program for this successful Groningen Research MA program, I gave a brief presentation to first-year MA students on my project and how it developed, entitled "'...continue huc scriptionj...': Paper and Paperwork in the Emergence of 'Modern' Diplomacy, 1493-1563'. The presentation encouraged students to think about how to translate research questions into research programs.

Past Conferences

On 9-10 April 2014 I attended the conference "Transforming Information: Record-Keeping in the Early Modern World", at the British Academy in London. The conference, organized by Professor Alexandra Walsham FBA, Dr Kate Peters, and Ms Liesbeth Corens, (University of Cambridge) drew together leading scholars of early modern record-keeping -- historians, literary scholars, and archivists. For the program see http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2014/Transforming_Information.cfm.

Invited Lectures

Center for Historical Studies, Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG) (University of Groningen, The Netherlands, 24 March 2014)

I presented my work-in-progress to Groningen's Center for Historical Studies'Regions, Networks and Mobilities' themegroup, under the title 'Recording the Embassy: Exploring the Materiality of Habsburg Foreign Policy-Making in the Early Modern Era'.

Past Conferences

Medieval Documents as Artefacts, 1100-1600. Writing and Writing Practices in the Medieval Low Countries(Maastricht, The Netherlands, 5-6 February 2014), organized by the working group Schrift en Schriftdragers in de Nederlanden in the Middeleeuwen, with the support of the Huygens Institute-ING and the Regional Historical Center-Limburg.

I presented the paper 'Ad Regem: Diplomatic Documents as Artefacts of Early Modern Foreign-Policy Making', which showed how we can use annotations, marginalia, dorsal notes, and other aspects of paper-borne diplomatic correspondence to trace the process of its reception, processing, and use in foreign-policy decisionmaking. The paper has been submitted for a forthcoming peer-reviewed volume of conference proceedings (keep an eye on this page for forthcoming publications!).

On 13 December 2013, I attended the conference The Organization of Archives at Birckbeck College in London, part of Prof. Filippo de Vivo's European Research Council-funded ARCHIves Project on The Comparative History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy. The stimulating conference drew together leading scholars on early modern archives. See the program at http://www.academia.edu/4777338/13_December_2013_The_Organization_of_Archives_A_one-day_conference.

History of Science Society Annual Meeting (Boston, USA, 22-24 November 2013)Together with Andreas Weber (University of Twente) I organized a panel entitled 'Paper and Paperwork: Tools of Governance and Science'. The panel was chaired by Prof. dr. Lissa Roberts (Twente) and included exciting papers from - co-organizer Andreas Weber: 'A Master of Paperwork: C.G.C. Reinwardt (1773-1854), Natural History and the Governance of the Dutch Empire in the East', on how a leading Dutch natural historian dealt with the problems of procuring and conserving his notes in a colonial, tropical environment; - Megan Barford (Cambridge): 'Whitehall-Quebec: Doing Hydrography across the North Atlantic, 1830-1850', on how the materiality of paper charts and maps complicated marine survey work and the production of sailing charts in the early nineteenth-century North Atlantic; - Whitney Laemmli (University of Pennsylvania): 'Paper Bodies: Labanotation and the German State, 1910-1935' on how dancer and choreographer Rudolf Laban attempted to chart human movement on paper to develop an archive of Germanic historical movement and dance.

I presented 'Armament of Embassy: Paper as a Tool of Governance in Sixteenth-Century Habsburg Foreign Policy', examining how the sixteenth-century Austrian Habsburg chancellery procured and employed steady supplies of affordable, quality paper and writing supplies. Paper offered nascent bureaucracies an effective method of organizing and managing political knowledge. In particular, this contribution suggested that chancelleries' and diplomats' access to cheap paper was prerequisite to shifts in early modern diplomatic practice -- thereby altering the ways in which chancelleries obtained, controlled, and deployed strategic political information in their foreign policymaking processes.

Past Conferences

On 14-15 November 2013, I attended Dr. Carla Meyer's "Papier im Mittelalter / Paper in the Middle Ages" conference at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. The conference was part of her sub-project entitled "Die papierene Umwälzung im spätmittelalterlichen Europa" and focused on paper in Northern Italian and Southern German chancellery practice, part of the Sonderforschungsbereich 933, "Materiale Textkulturen". The stimulating program drew together paper historians, art historians, papermakers, paper conservators, and archaeologists from across Europe and the U.S., with a keynote address by Humboldt Universität Hon.-Prof. and journalist Lothar Müller, author of the excellent 2012 Weiße Magie. Die Epoche des Papiers (now translated as White Magic: The Age of Paper). The proceedings of the conference were published in February 2015 as Papier im mittelalterlichen Europa. Herstellung und Gebrauch (open access at http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/431205).

Research Network

I joined the Global Archivalities Research Network, a project launched by Randolph Head (University of California, Riverside), Arndt Brendecke (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and Hilde de Weerdt (Universiteit Leiden). The network seeks to connect and recruit humanists in all disciplines interested in the comparative history of archives before the modern era.

I presented the paper 'Diplomatic Diplomatics? Approaching Early Modern Diplomacy through Paperwork Practices', as part of a very stimulating panel organized by Markus Friedrich, and entitled 'Archival Practices. Producing Knowledge in Early Modern Repositories of Writing'. Fellow participants included: - Markus Friedrich (Hamburg): 'What is the History of Archives and what could it be?' - Elizabeth Williamson (London): 'Producing political knowledge: from the 'late great Confusion' of papers to Sir Francis Walsingham's table book' - Randolph Head (UC- Riverside): 'From Scribal Practices to Archival Knowledge Systems in Innsbruck, 1480-1565' Marc-André Grebe (Bielefeld) was unfortunately unable to present his paper 'Governing Philip's II Paper Empire - The work of Diego Ayala, royal archivist of the Spanish Habsburgs at the Archive of Simancas (1561-1594)'.

I presented the paper 'Problems Papered Over? Early Modern Strategies of Paper Supply in Wartime and Economic Crisis', exploring how the Austrian Habsburg lands largely shifted their paper procurement from Italian to Southern German and Swiss suppliers in the period of the Italian Wars. The workshop, sponsored by the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG), was part of the University's 'Sustainable Citizenship' research program.

At this symposium, which brought together researchers on medieval and early modern diplomacy from across the Netherlands, I gave a presentation on 'Paper and Paperwork Practices in Early Modern Diplomacy'. The paper argued for the important role of paper in the fifteenth-century shift from the extraordinary embassies of 'medieval' diplomacy, dispatched for finite purposes of representation, ratification, and peace-making, to '(early) modern' diplomacy, in which princes established networks of resident ambassadors tasked gathering and transmitting strategic or politically-relevant information. Diplomats' new reporting practices, I suggested, coincided with the growing availability of relatively cheap, portable, and easily-stored paper. Part of the proceedings was published in a special issue of the Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis.

At this stimulating faculty seminar, led by Ann Blair (Harvard), I discussed how early modern ministers, secretaries, and diplomats coped with a paper-based information explosion in the early modern era with colleagues from across the US working on scholars' strategies for managing information.

Past Workshops

Entangled Histories Workshop (Rastede, Germany, 25-26 February 2011)

Historians from the universities of Groningen (The Netherlands), Bremen (Germany), and Oldenburg (Germany) came together at this international faculty workshop, which I helped to organize, to share research directions, strategies for incorporating research into teaching, and opportunities for future collaboration. I presented my research program as 'Paper Princes: Entangled Histories of Paper in Early Modern Diplomatic Communications'.

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